Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 18:27:12 +0930 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, jbryant@tfs.net, dkelly@HiWAAY.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: F1.17 (was Re: C2 Trusted FreeBSD?) Message-ID: <199710140857.SAA01615@word.smith.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 14 Oct 1997 01:32:55 MST." <21910.876817975@time.cdrom.com>
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> > > Whatever shortcomings the F117 may have in the frailty of its skin > > > coating are more than offset by its ability to go after radar sites > > > and down SAM corridors after highly defended targets. > > > > *chuckle* It's still the only aircraft that's seriously threatened by > > a Piper with a big box of dry ice. 8) > > You still need to find it in order to drop the ice on it, and that's > the rub, aye? :-) You know where the target is; a stealthy aircraft's not much use if all it can do is hide. 8) > I think the aircraft's performance in desert storm > pretty much speaks for itself. You mean of course the spin put on its performance by a very active PR contingent. 8) > No way in hell we'd have been able to > waltz in and hit the air ministry building in Hanoi during the Vietnam > war with such equanimity, and I know we lost a fair number of aircraft > trying. All the totally screwed up ROE stipulations didn't help > either, of course, but I think you have to give some of today's tech > due credit in making a fairly straight-forward process out of things > which would have been considered completely suicidal in earlier > conflicts. That depends on whether you are constrained to thinking inside the current model of escalated conflict and warplay. I'd have to say that there are plenty of other ways that the entire conflict could have been dealt with. For sure, in a most-toys-wins comparison, the '117 is a great asset. > > The notion that you need a pilot at the controls at all is the > > obsolescent concept. With todays state-of-the-art in semi- and > > fully-autonomous RPVs, piloted military aircraft are close to becoming > > dinosaurs. > > "Sort of." This was the argument advanced by quite a few when the > Tomahawk SLAM came into play, especially among the submarine > contingent who, until now, have never been able to play a significant > role in anything but the interdiction aspects of a conflict and are > rather happy with the new land attack role which a brace of terrain > following cruise missiles gives them. However, that argument also > ignores several key facts, one of which is that a cruise missile may > be "smart" but it's not particularly capable in a number of other very > important areas, like post-strike assessment. It's not meant to be; it's a weapon. Use a surveilance device to look at things, and a weapon to break them. My only point is that transporting these in a vulnerable, performance-constrained vehicle is inefficient and expensive. > ... As Werner Von Braun was reputed > to have said, it's also one of the few pieces of equipment which can > be mass produced with unskilled labor. :) The problem isn't using people, it's protecting them. > Also, when you're arguing your RPVs, I assume you're also not talking > about replacing the gunship helicopters? Those are just too usefully > agile to get rid of anytime soon, I think. Why are they going to get less agile when you remove the need to provide protection for the crew? If you cut the cockpit and glass out of an Apache, you reduce the side area by about 25%; this lets you cut the rotor size and boom length, giving you a shorter rotational moment and *more* agility. > If we had full video telemetry to each smart weapon, each also capable > of making independant target assessment and extended "loitering" over > the battlefield, that might start to shift the balance away from the > manned aircraft, I think, but it all sort of depends on cost, too. If > each hyperintelligent fire-and-forget weapon costs you, say, $5M > apiece (assuming a modest 5X increase in the Tomahawk's current cost) > then it's going to cost you something like $30 *billion* in completely > expended dollars to mount even a modest air campaign of 6000 sorties - > I believe we flew easily twice that many in desert storm. You are still thinking like a capitalist warmonger. Economy of scale and pragmatic design would bring weapon costs *down*, not drive them up. I'm not advocating "hypersmart" weapons, just "adequately smart" ones. The Tomahawk is an excellent example of an overpriced, underperforming military design; put it in the hands of a manufacturer working in the real world and you'd be looking at a 5x reduction in cost. (Apologies to all the MI combine employees out there for the rude handwave.) For a good example, look at the aircraft that the Australian BoM are developing for remote-area weather sensing. It's fully autonomous, capable of dealing intelligently with almost any weather condition (inclding flying in cyclonic weather conditions) and has a "loiter time" measured in days. The small-quantity build cost for these is rumoured to be in the sub-50K bracket; about on a par with a set of boots for your F117 pilot. 8) > some future conflict. We're still using F4 Phantoms from the Vietnam > war, fer chrissake, and we have to be careful that we don't wind up > pricing ourselves right out of the market, eh? That wouldn't be very > capitalist. :-) :-) No, but there's a fine line between that and screwing a paranoid government for every last cent its taxpayers can be ripped of. IMHO military equipment should be commercially viable. In many cases it is, but in many more it's pathetically poor, and almost always ridiculously overhyped. mike
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